Epic detail plans for Unreal Engine 6 and share vision of a metaverse spanning "Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Epic Games laid off over 800 people a year ago, following what CEO Tim Sweeney confessed was an "unrealistic" period of investment designed to "grow Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators". Now, it's time to start talking about brighter, metaversal tomorrows and hopefully, not do the whole thing all over again. Epic have detailed early plans for Unreal Engine 6, which Sweeney says will combine Unreal Engine with Fortnite's easy-to-use Unreal Editor to create a gigantic, "interoperable" metaverse platform that lets developers sell stuff that can seamlessly be transferred to other games, whether they run on Unreal Engine or not. Stealth blockchain post? Genuinely, I can neither confirm nor deny.

All this comes from a new Verge interview with Sweeney and Epic executive vice-president Saxs Persson, which follows this year's Unreal Fest conference in Seattle. Regarding the layoffs, Sweeney told the site that Epic are now financially stable.

"Last year, before Unreal Fest, we were spending about a billion dollars a year more than we were making," he said. "Now, we're spending a bit more than we're making."

Epic "have a very robust amount of funding relative to pretty much any company in the industry and are making forward investments really judiciously that we could throttle up or down as our fortunes change," Sweeney went on. "We feel we're in a perfect position to execute for the rest of this decade and achieve all of our plans at our size."

Foremost among those grand plans is the blueprint for Unreal Engine 6, which will take several years to arrive, and is built around the philosophy of "interoperable content" that can be transferred between any game running on the engine. Epic's principal testcase for this idea is the Manhattan-Project-ish "games and entertainment universe" they're making for Disney, which will smoosh together the Disney and Fortnite communities to produce a hellish, hybrid race of monsters I call "Disnites", who raid our